Some calls for papers: deadlines in January – April 2013

21 January 2013 Comments Off on Some calls for papers: deadlines in January – April 2013

Appearing here below arranged by date of deadline: in chronological progression, and in the order in which information has been received. All have some pertinence to “Early Romance Studies.” New versions of this post will appear over the course of the present term: at the end of January (for CFPs with dealines in February onwards), the end of February (March onwards), and so on. Information is gleaned from O’Brien’s emails and listserve feeds and may well therefore reflect her own interests; most are in North America, and many are graduate student conferences (to encourage The Next Generation, on whom the survival of our field—nay, verily, our whole Early Romance world—depends). Please email O’Brien any calls for papers you would like to see posted here, and she will duly and dutifully consider your proposition.

15 March 2013: UCLA MEMSA Graduate Student Conference: “Pedagogical Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Studies”

15 March 2013: Scientific colloquium (Pre- and Postdocs) accompanying the 625th anniversary conference of the University of Cologne: “Universitas scholarium. The social and cultural history of the European student from the Middle Ages to the Present”

30 April 2013: Medieval Philology Today International Conference (Urbino): “Medieval Philology Today” (first of two conferences, on the Germanic languages; the second, planned for 2015, will be on other European languages)

FULL VERSION:

21 January 2013

The special theme for this year’s Congress is “@the edge”, but papers for the CSM Annual Meeting can address any topic on medieval studies. Proposals for complete sessions are also invited. Papers may be delivered in either English or French, and bilingual sessions are particularly welcome.

Proposals should include a one-page abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes reading time.

31 January 2013

14th International Congress of the ICLS – International Courtly Literature Society
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon; and Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
22nd to 27th July 2013

“Courtly Parodies / Parodies of Courtoisie”

The 14th Triennial International Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (ICLS/SILC) will be hosted by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, and the Universidade Aberta.

ICLS/SILC was founded in 1973, taking for its mission to promote the study of courtly cultures as they have become known to us through documents produced in Europe in the Middle Ages. Its domains of study are the different genres in European medieval languages (lais, romance, poetry, theatre, and so forth), Latin medieval literature, the historic context of courtly life, as well as medieval art, architecture and music. It is, at present, chaired by Keith Busby (University of Wisconsin), and it has ten regional branches – Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, North American, Swiss, and Tunisian, as well as the recently created Iberian branch.

Following on an established tradition in the triennial congress of the ICLS, the meeting that will be held in Lisbon aims to provide an occasion for the study of courtly literature in an interdisciplinary context which may reflect the transversal nature of the texts and works predominantly studied in our Society.

Proposals (for sessions and papers) may focus on the following topics:

NB: To provide more time for discussion, communications should not exceed 20 minutes, and sessions should not exceed 1 hour.

The official languages of the ICLS are English, French, and German. Since the 14th Congress of the ICLS will be the first one to take place in the Iberian Peninsula, and it will mark the creation of the Iberian branch, proposals may also be submitted in any of the Iberian languages.

Only proposals from members of the ICLS will be accepted. If you are not a member of ICLS and wish to join our Society, please contact your regional branch (contacts: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/icls/branches.html).

Registration fee is 100 € until january, 31. A 130 € euro fee will apply to registrations from February 1st to April 30 (deadline for registrations). Registrated delegates are entitled to one volume of the proceedings of the Congress containing the keynote addresses and selected papers.

31 January 2013

Graduate Conference in Medieval Studies at Princeton University
April 13, 2013

“War, Peace, and Religion in the Middle Ages”

The Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University invites submissions for its twentieth annual graduate conference in Princeton, New Jersey.

Keynote Speaker: Brett Whalen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“War, Peace, and Religion”

Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, religion deeply influenced practices of, protests against, and debates about war. Religious difference frequently provoked medieval warfare, and was an important aspect of conflicts as diverse as the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and the Iberian peninsula, Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons, and the Crusades. Religion could also spark violence and conflict on a local level: the medieval church’s fight to define and ensure orthodoxy often led to the violent suppression of supposedly heretical religious groups, while many medieval communities participated in horrific persecutions of religious minorities in their midst. Some saints, popes, and clerics instigated and directed war to further their religious and political ambitions, while many others tried to control violent conflict and promote peace. Religion’s influence on warfare also extended to academic debate and medieval literature. Theologians, exegetes, and religious writers strove to conceptualize war and peace in Christian and historical terms, and religious concerns saturated many academic and social debates over the nature, place, and utility of armed conflict in medieval Christendom.

How did religion influence the outbreak, practice, containment, and conceptualization of war in the Middle Ages? Conversely, how did war and peace – real and imagined – shape medieval religion? We invite the submission of proposals from a variety of disciplines, time periods, geographies, source materials, and methodological approaches. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

In order to support participation by speakers from outside the northeastern United States, we are offering a limited number of modest subsidies to help offset the cost of travel to Princeton. Financial assistance may not be available for every participant; funding priority goes to those who have the farthest to travel. Every speaker will have the option of staying with a resident graduate student as an alternative to paying for a hotel room.

Interested graduate students should submit abstracts of no more than 500 words to Molly Lester and Leah Klement (warandpeace2013@gmail.com) by January 31st, 2013.

All applicants will be notified by February 10th, 2013. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes.

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1 February 2013

Abstracts from graduate students are now being accepted for the 30th annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, to be held at the University of Connecticut on Saturday, March 16, 2013. This year’s theme will be “Collaborations.”

“Collaborations” is a concept that pervades both the medieval period and the field of medieval studies, and provides a major theme for considering a variety of relevant subjects. In its breadth, this theme is meant to encompass a wide array of topics from graduate students working in all areas of medieval studies. Toward this end, we welcome papers from an assortment of disciplines, including:

Anthropology

Archaeology

Art History

Byzantine Studies

Classical Studies

Digital Humanities

Gender Studies

History

History of Science

Islamic Studies

Judaic Studies

Language Studies

Literary Studies

Mediterranean Studies

Manuscript Studies

Musicology

Philosophy

Religious Studies

Theology

We also look forward to papers that incorporate or deal with notions of interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary methods; and that examine the theme of collaborations theoretically.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Collaborations in medieval culture

Receptions of the medieval in the modern world

Collaborations in academia

Interdisciplinary/multi-disciplinary methodologies

Theories of collaboration

The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2013. Abstracts of up to 250 words should be e-mailed to Brandon Hawk and Patrick Butler at uconn.nemsc@gmail.com. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length and read in English. Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit their papers prior to the conference to be considered for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award for the Outstanding Conference Paper.

15 February 2013

HORTULUS CALL FOR PAPERS: WOUNDS, TORTURE, AND THE GROTESQUE

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed, peer-reviewed, and born-digital journal devoted to the culture, literature, history, and society of the medieval past. Published semi-annually, the journal collects exceptional examples of work by graduate students on a number of themes, disciplines, subjects, and periods of medieval studies. We also welcome book reviews of monographs published or re-released in the past five years that are of interest to medievalists. For the spring issue we are highly interested in reviews of books which fall under the current special topic.

Our upcoming issue will be published in the spring of 2013, and concerns itself with the theme: wounds, torture, and the grotesque. These subjects have become increasingly popular in medieval scholarship. Ideas of the grotesque are being reconsidered in relation to concepts of race and racial theory, a discussion which has contemporary impacts far beyond the academic world. Concurrent to these developments in medieval studies has been an increase in scholarly attention paid to these subject areas in the field of medical humanities, which has further energized academic discussion of corporeality and the body. Such explorations include the analysis of suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to one another as human beings.

Hortulus invites full-length articles which consider these themes either individually or in tandem. We particularly encourage the submission of proposals that take a strongly theoretical and/or interdisciplinary approach, and that examine new and previously unconsidered aspects of these subjects. Possible topics may be drawn from any discipline: history, art history, archaeology, literature, linguistics, music, theology, etc. Work from every interpretive angle is encouraged – memory, gender, historiography, medievalism, consilience, etc. Most importantly, we seek engaging, original work that contributes to our collective understanding of the medieval era.

Contributions should be in English and roughly 6,000 – 12,000 words, including all documentation and citational apparatus; book reviews are typically between 500-1,000 words but cannot exceed 2,000. All notes must be endnotes, and a bibliography must be included; submission guidelines can be found on our website. Contributions may be submitted to hortulus@hortulus-journal.com and are due February 15, 2013. If you are interested in submitting a paper but feel you would need additional time, please send a query email and details about an expected time-scale for your submission. Queries about submissions or the journal more generally can also be sent to this address.

15 February 2013

The cultural moment of the Renaissance can be characterized not only as a movement in time – as artists and writers looked back to and marked a new sense of temporal displacement from the cultural and political forms of classical antiquity – but also as a set of real and imagined passages through space. These geographical transits often seem to fall along the lines of the compass rose: we might think here of the movement from East to West of Greek art, texts and intellectuals and its mythic-historical corollary in the translatio imperii; or of the spread of cultural forms and discourses northward from Florence, Venice, and Rome through the period.

“Renaissance Orientations: East and West, North and South” aims to bring together graduate students from across the disciplines to explore and interrogate the usefulness and importance of these conceptual axes for the study of Renaissance cultural space, broadly conceived and at any scale, from the local to the global. We welcome papers offering new perspectives on traditional lines of interaction, as well as those which expand or destabilize prevailing structures of Renaissance cultural geography. Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to renaissanceorientations@gmail.com by Feburary 15, 2013.

Since Henri Lefebvre’s 1958 The Social Production of Space, medieval scholars have increasingly been interested in the interplay between the political, the economic, and the cultural with the concept of physical space. How is space constructed by social forces, and how is society influenced by either physical or ideological spaces? More specifically among these social forces, our conference focuses on the concept of authority: who gets to say how political, cultural, and economic processes take place within a specific space, and how they are spoken of, written of, and remembered? Conversely, how might speaking itself be a form of resistance against authority? We encourage interdisciplinary discourse around the theme of authority in any aspect(s) of law, culture, and society in the Middle Ages. For example, how do kings maintain authority over their subjects, and how is this authority constructed or contested? How do writers establish the authority of their texts, and why do they even need to? How was God’s authority sometimes challenged or undermined? Or was it?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

war as a means of contesting spaces or territories

winners and losers: who gets to tell the story?

public versus private space: who controls and defines these spaces and how?

God as the ultimate authority: religious discourses and conflicts

establishing authorship, auctoritas, and differing roles in the creation of oral narratives, manuscripts, or printed editions

alteration of texts (by scribes, commentators, or translators, for example) as a means of contesting authority and asserting one’s power

linguistics: code-switching or language use as contesting authority or asserting one’s power or independence

process and performance of speech as constructing or resisting authority (such as in court culture, pageantry, or parliament)

use of heraldic motifs (how were they used or changed?) in books

patronage as a form of contestation or affirmation of one’s power

gendered spaces and voices: women patrons, women’s vs. men’s roles

the creation, use, and transformation of urban spaces

The conference is open to graduate students studying the Middle Ages (300-1500) in all disciplines, geographical regions, and stages of research.

22 February 2013

Cambridge French Graduate Conference
26th – 27th April 2013

“MATTERS OF TIME”

MATTERS OF TIME hints towards the oft used colloquialism ‘It’s just a matter of time’, and yet ‘matter’ and ‘time’ are individually unstable entities, and the attempt to think them together is a challenging but exciting conjunction that this conference seeks to explore. Often seen as a relentlessly abstract, calculated and regulatory measure, time can also be plural, dense, concrete, and embodied: what is the materiality of time, and the temporality of matter?

MATTER has always been considered as relevant for aesthetics as a field engaging with material objects. But to what extent can artworks be considered MATTERS OF TIME? This area might not only address issues of periodisation, but also issues concerning time itself as a material medium inherent in the work: for example, what is the time of poetry? How does narratology conceptualise novelistic time? In what ways does contemporary thing theory attend to the time of things? MATTERS OF TIME might also suggest an engagement with the material detritus produced in the passing of time. In his arcades project, Walter Benjamin methodologically considers the Paris of the 19th century as a ruin at the very time of its heyday – what are today’s ruins, what are ruins, what is today?

For the so-called time-based arts, that is, film, performance and theatre, time is constitutive, and we would like to call for papers interrogating these art forms’ aesthetics in relation to questions of duration, endurance and attention. What does it mean to be bored during a performance? Can cinematic long takes provide a realism of the senses, or interrogate reality more closely? How does the concrete, embodied experience of time relate to the mechanical measure of the clock, and can or should these be considered as oppositions? Time also changes bodies, their self-presentation, conception, identification and combination. Whether over mere seconds or whole epochs, what does the passing of time mean to, and through, the corporeal and social body?

To the extent that French theory is often equated with structuralism and post-structuralism, there is a common perception that it tends to favour thinking through spatial metaphors, privileging synchronic structures over diachronic movements. On the other hand, Hegelian and Marxist dialectics has been highly influential on French theory from the 1920s onwards, when they became a steady concern for French thinkers in terms of questions of the end of history, of utopianism, of the time of labour and work, of teleology or anti-teleology. Questions to be addressed in this field might also concern questions of reverse projections regarding a golden age, medieval and early modern conceptions of history as well as theological conceptions of time and eternity.

We would like to invite all graduate students, from within or without French Studies, as well as academics, artists and other interested parties, to submit proposals in the following areas (and / or in interdisciplinary perspectives) are welcome : French Literature, Francophone Literatures, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, History, Gender Studies, Linguistics, Translation, Art History, Cinema / Film Studies, Performance / Theatre Studies, Photography, Anthropology.

Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words, and emailed to fgrscam@gmail.com by Friday the 22nd of February. We would also particularly welcome proposals for performances and readings which portray an active engagement with the conference theme.

A selection of papers given at the conference will be subsequently edited into a book length publication.

1 March 2013

International Conference of the International Arthurian Society, Nordic Branch
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
23-25 May 2013

“ARTHUR OF THE NORTH”

“Arthur of the North” is the First International Conference organised by The Nordic Branch of the International Arthurian Society (IAS). It is dedicated to the Arthurian narratives in any of the medieval Scandinavian languages (Old Norse, Old Swedish, Old Danish). We welcome papers on any topic related to the medieval Scandinavian Arthurian traditions.

Among the themes that might be addressed are: theories and practices of translations, culture-historical contexts, literary style, form, structure, genre-related issues, and manuscript tradition of the Nordic Arthurian texts.
The Arthurian literary tradition, which the Scandinavian texts form part of, was transmitted in Latin and all the medieval vernacular languages. Therefore, we welcome also comparative papers on the various traditions as well as studies of Arthurian material which is of relevance for the Scandinavian context.

Papers should be given in English and be twenty minutes long. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of your paper (max 300 words) to Sif Rikhardsdottir, sifr@hi.is, by 1 March, 2013.

This online CFP contains all of the sessions — regular and special topic — that were received and approved by November 1. Sessions may have been approved and included since that date, however, so check from time to time.

MARCH 1 – Deadline to email your paper proposal directly to the session chair listed in the CFP. After this date, you may also check with the chair to see if s/he is still seeking papers.

MARCH 15 – Session chairs should select presenters and notify ALL who applied of their status. Session chairs begin to enter presenters into online program form.

APRIL 1 – Membership in RMMLA is required of all session chairs and presenters, even those from the local host instititution(s).

3 March 2013

The Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference 2013
IGRS, London
Saturday, 11th May 2013

“Intercultural Encounters”

What happens when two cultures interact? How does the crossing of boundaries – a perennial human need – impact on cultural identity and on the nature of communication? Intercultural encounters can take place through human journeys, such as pilgrimages, tourism and movements of conquest, or through the circulation of cultural artefacts such as texts, visual art or other media. Whatever the form of the encounter or its motivation – belligerent invasion, the need for discovery or the wish to communicate with others – such encounters are usually defining moments, calling complex processes into play.

A crucial transfer takes place when two cultures meet, as the language, concepts, customs and art forms of one culture pass into the interpretative realm of another. By means of a process of ‘translation’, the observed culture is understood through foreign terms, different temporal frames and different media, and is thus transformed. This raises the issue of our cultural and temporal situatedness, and the effect this has on our (lack of) ability fully to appreciate other cultures. Similarly the transmission of a literary text into another culture often gives rise to new interpretations, through many kinds of rewriting, both intertextual and intermedial. Active textual reappropriation is in fact a highly productive strategy, connecting literature across national or temporal borders.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that explore French/francophone studies and its many intercultural encounters (across all periods), and whose approaches to these encounters may include anthropology, cultural studies, French/francophone, comparative and translation studies. What happens when French/francophone studies incorporates the artefacts and optics of different cultural others?

The conference will include a training session led by Professor Adrian Armstrong (Queen Mary, UCL) looking at post-PhD career options and ways to improve your CV.

Travel grants will be available; students presenting will be given priority.

Please send abstracts (250 – 300 words) for twenty-minute papers (in French or English) along with the name of your institution, the title of your PhD and your year of study to the conference organisers, Rebecca Ewart (QUB) rewart02@qub.ac.uk and Marilyn Mallia (University of Southampton) M.Mallia@soton.ac.uk no later than 3rd March 2013. Informal enquiries are also welcome.

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15 March 2013

Session type: Discussion Group
Organization: Provençal Language and Literature
Title of session: Translating the Troubadours
Submission requirements: Abstracts, 250-500w.
Deadline for submissions: 15 March 2013
Description: From early French ‘adaptations’ to Pound, one of the modes of reception of troubadour poetry has been translation. Proposals on linguistic and/or cultural translation from any period.

Dr Eliza Zingesser
Research Fellow
Clare Hall
University of Cambridgeez222@cam.ac.uk

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15 March 2013

UCLA MEMSA Graduate Student Conference
7 June 2013

“Pedagogical Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Studies”

The last two decades have seen radical revisions to curricula at universities and colleges around the world. But have curricular changes been accompanied by pedagogical developments? When it comes to teaching, graduate students often learn by doing. By virtue of their experiments and their proximity to the undergraduate curriculum, they are among the most innovative educators on their campuses. The Medieval and Early Modern Students Association at UCLA invites graduate students to share their experience at a conference on June 7 that deals with teaching Medieval and Early Modern material in the undergraduate classroom. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics and lines of inquiry:

Methodological approaches that lend themselves to Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Digital approaches and 21st-century technology in the Medieval and Early Modern classroom

Surveying the survey course

Transformative pedagogy and Medieval and Early Modern studies

Creating dialogues across the curriculum

Performance studies

Synthesizing research and reading with other undergraduate disciplines

Seminar learning vs/and lecture learning

Teaching writing in the Medieval and Early Modern studies

Translation and multilingualism (teaching in translations vs. original languages)

New Historicism and student learning

Politics and pedagogy (teaching race, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern studies)

Theory in Medieval and Early Modern studies

We welcome abstracts from a variety of fields within or adjacent to Medieval and Early Modern studies. While specific teaching techniques are encouraged, we’d like papers that include a broader theoretical and pedagogical scope. Abstracts of less than 500 words for 20-minute papers should be emailed to memsa.ucla@gmail.com by March 15 with the subject line CONFERENCE ABSTRACT. Papers should be timed to less than 20 minutes.

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15 March 2013

Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC)
San Juan, Puerto Rico
24-27 October 2013

The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) is now accepting proposals for individual papers and complete panels for its 2013 annual conference, to be held October 24-27, 2013 at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The deadline for proposals is March 15, 2013. Approximately four weeks after the submission deadline, the Program Committee will notify all those who submitted proposals of its decision.

The SCSC actively encourages the participation of international scholars as well as the integration of younger colleagues into the academic community. We also welcome proposals for roundtables sponsored by scholarly societies that are affiliated with the SCSC.

The SCSC, a not-for-profit scholarly organization, receives no governmental or institutional funding. In order to participate in this conference, delegates or their sponsoring institution/organization will need to fund their own travel and lodging expenses in addition to a $170 per delegate registration fee ($100 student fee). The registration fee is used to pay for conference facilities and general events. By paying the fee, delegates become members in the SCSC and receive the Sixteenth Century Journal.

For more information, please contact:
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
Vice President and Program Chair
History Department, Cleveland State University
2121 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44115
tel. 216/687-3920e.lehfeldt@csuohio.edu

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31 March 2013

University of Cologne anniversary conference, pre- and post-doctoral strand
October 24th-25th, 2013

“Universitas scholarium. The social and cultural history of the European student from the Middle Ages to the Present”

Scientific colloquium (Pre- and Postdocs) accompanying the anniversary conference of the University of Cologne: “Back to the future? The “old” University of Cologne in the context of the history of the European university” („Zurück in die Zukunft? – Die „alte“ Kölner Universität im Kontext der europäischen Universitätsgeschichte“)

The mediaeval institution of the “universitas magistrorum et scholarium“ as a form of (self)organization of teachers and learners is the origin of the modern European universities. Despite the Reformation, Enlightenment, Humboldtian Reform and Bologna-Process, traces of the original mediaeval self-conception of “universitas” can still be found in both the contemporary higher education policies and in the daily life of today’s scholars and students. The unique development of the European university is the topic of the History ofUniversities, a partial discipline of constantly growing international importance and cross- linking.

625 years after the foundation of the “universitas studii sanctae civitatis coloniensis“ in 1388, the University of Cologne hosts a scientific conference to present and discuss the current state of research of the History of Universities. A special focus will be put on the question of how the “mediaeval” element in the history of the university developed to influence present and future challenges and perspectives of research, teaching and politics.

The conference will be opened with a two-day colloquium primarily addressing junior researchers from the disciplines History of Universities and History of Science, but also Cultural and Social History. Topic of the colloquium is the student as the protagonist of the history of the European university. The examination of the subject is supposed to be interdisciplinary, comprise different time periods and especially focus on the European perspective.

Possible thematic areas may include:

Students as individuals and as a social group in written and non-written sources -Student migration in the European and the extra-European context

Journey through life: studies, profession, career, social rise and fall

Student organization(s), the influence of students on research, teaching and politics -Conflicts, town vs. gown, student protest, authorities and repression

Minorities, fringe groups, foreigners and outsiders as part of the “universitas” -Changes and continuities in student life in the longue durèe, from social class to citizen

We would be glad to receive proposals covering those or other relevant topics including an abstract of not more than 300 words and a significant CV until March 31st, 2013. Please send your papers to andreas.berger@uni-koeln.de. Accepted languages are German and English. Limited travel grants are possible.

30 April 2013

University of Urbino
December 2-4, 2013

“Medieval Philology Today”

Issues and Aims of the Conference

When trying to define philology, and in particular medieval philology, the diversity and even occasionally the conflict between the personalities of its founding fathers appear to be discouraging. Schegel considers philology as “ a liberal study in that it merely seeks to cultivate and form the spirit.” Jacob Grimm seems to share such an opinion when he claims, in 1829, that he feels the lack of “fruitful idleness”. However, the pioneer of Germanic philology was driven, according to his nephew Herman, by the “impetus to collect facts.” And it is Grimm himself who points to such diversity in attitudes, working styles and research aims when, in a speech in memory of Lachmann in 1851, he states: “We can place all the philologists who have made meaningful contributions into two categories: those who deal with words in the name of things and those who deal with things in the name of words”. He included Lachmann in the latter and himself in the former.

And yet it is precisely this diversity that hides a common denominator, which is still the foundation and soul of all philological studies: the knowledge of the complexity of human phenomena and the necessity to account for such complexity at a methodological level in order to understand them. In other words, its original humanistic spirit still breathes in the interdisciplinary heart of philology. And it is indeed the humanistic spirit that animates Grimm’s words when in 1831 he recalls his student years at Marburg:

I would like to praise the spirit that reigned at that time among the students of Marburg: it was fresh and carefree on the whole. Since then the supreme power of the State has intervened more forcefully in the control of schools and universities. In an excessively anxious manner this power wants to guarantee its future civil servants and believes it can do so through a great number of obligatory examinations. I believe that in future the severity of such an attitude should be mitigated. Not to mention the fact that this attitude not only clips the wings of young people who are about to take flight but also places barriers in front of a certain ‘letting oneself go’ that is beneficial for that person’s future, a condition that will no longer return.. It has been proved that, if ordinary talent is difficult to measure, with genius it is impossible. So when the many regulations in the degree courses are enforced, they produce a uniform orderliness which will bring no advantage to the State in difficult times. Everything is too foreseeable and pre-arranged, even in the students’ heads. The term’s work heads uncritically towards the exams, the student is obliged to attend all the lessons for which he has to obtain an exam certificate, lessons which he may not have chosen either because he was not attracted by the professor or because his inclinations would have oriented him towards other courses. But he has practically no time left to attend the lessons that he is not obliged to attend. At least let’s hope that the professors themselves are not told what they have to teach and how they are to teach it!

Thirteen years after the Bologna Process and the consequent rationalization of university courses at a European level, Grimm’s words take on a heart-felt prophetic tone that questions the entire academic community. This Conference aims at a recognition of medieval philology’s raison d’être today. The philology under discussion will be that of the so-called Germanic languages. Contributions will be welcome that directly or indirectly take into consideration the topics indicated below.

In 2015 a second Conference will be held that will be dedicated to the philology of other medieval European languages.

Medieval philology today: suggested themes

1) What it is

Epistemological foundations, specific scope and methods

History of medieval philology

The present state

Recent trends

The question of raison d’être: why still pursue philology? What knowledge can it still offer?

2) The relevance of Medieval philology in European university systems

Has Medieval philology the right to exist in the present university system?

Political implications and repercussions

Job prospects

Must spendibility on the market really be the parameter for assessing the relevance of medieval philology in the university system?

3. AN IMPORTANT FEATURE OF MEDIEVAL PHILOLOGY:
INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Philology and philosophy

Philology and ideology

Philology and textual criticism (notions of text, of author …)

Philology and study of manuscripts

Philology and archive-keeping

Philology and literature (eg. Translation studies, reception theory…)

Philology and cultural history and theory

Philology and theatre

Philology and linguistics

Philology and historiography

Philology and editions (paper, digital …)

Philology and publishing

Philology and IT

Philology and graphology

Registration procedure

This call for papers is addressed to all scholars of Germanic philology, including Ph.D. students. The website (www.filologiemedievali.it), in three languages, will be functioning by the end of 2012. The site will give details of the conference and links for registration and sending uploads of abstracts of a maximum of 500 characters (blank spaces included).

Abstracts may also be sent by post to the Conference secretariat (see below) In this case no information of personal details of the author must be included in the text of the abstract itself. The selection of abstracts sent both by uploading or by post will be anonymous.
The author sending an abstract by post must enclose the following details on a separate sheet of paper: name, surname, academic position, affiliation, and professional or personal address. This sheet, together with a sealed envelope containing the abstract, must be placed in a second envelope and sent to the following address: